These providers, which surprisingly The Wall Street Journal misapprehends as insurers, are bracing for a drop in enrollment in the ongoing health plan provision program “turmoil.” There’s this key passage in the article at the link:
[M]any firms say they expect to lose consumers who will bear the full brunt of the rate increases—those who aren’t eligible for the health law’s premium subsidies, which help enrollees with annual incomes of less than around $48,000.
The Wall Street Journal has noted that the Trump administration has taken regulatory action to reduce, if not eliminate (the Supreme Court still has to do its job vis-à-vis a Little Sisters of the Poor case, as does Congress legislatively, contra a short handful of Republicans who prefer Obamacare intact over any step toward getting rid of it), the requirement that health plan providers provide contraception to women at no cost to those women coverees and do so regardless of any question of conscience or religious tenet.
Naturally, Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally have their collective panties in a wedgie over that. However, they carefully ignore certain inconvenient facts.
The Wall Street Journal has misunderstood the situation and the proposal [emphasis added].
President Donald Trump’s executive order on health insurance, the most significant step so far to put his stamp on health policy, is designed to give more options to healthy consumers. It also could divide the insurance market in two.
What Trump is purportedly going to do with his Executive Order is
Here are some stats regarding Obamacare’s impact on our poor, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
More than one in three of taxed [via the individual mandate penalty] households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.
And
More than 75% of penalized households made less than $50,000 and nine in 10 earned less than $75,000.
And
Fewer families paid the tax in 2015 than in 2014, yet government revenues increased to more than $3 billion from about $1.7 billion, as the financial punishment for lacking coverage increased.
These are…triggered…by Thursday’s Wall Street Journal piece on how the Graham-Cassidy Plan Would Change Health Coverage.
The Congressional Budget Office has said that, without a rule requiring insurers to charge all customers comparable premiums, health plans could become prohibitively expensive for some people with pre-existing conditions.
The plans wouldn’t be insurance plans, either, since the premiums wouldn’t have anything to do with the risk being transferred. The plans would be welfare plans.
Separately, states could also waive a requirement that insurers provide a set of medical benefits like mental-health services and prescription-drug coverage. If those benefits aren’t required, people with costly medical conditions could have difficulty buying insurance with the relevant services or medications.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is beating that drum, again, and has support from some Progressive-Democratic Party Senators.
The health proposal, dubbed Medicare for all, would offer the same suite of medical benefits required for some insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act and eliminate most out-of-pocket costs. Mr Sanders argues that although taxes would likely rise to support the new system, families would save money by no longer needing to purchase health coverage. The government, he says, could also secure lower prices for medical services.
Too many now are begging for surrender on repeal and replace.
[F]ew congressional Republicans have signaled they are ready to let the health-care market deteriorate while their constituents are still battling higher premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on the individual marketplace.
This means those Republicans are signaling that they don’t have the stomach to repeal Obamacare at all, which would be the ultimate deterioration of it.
This is a betrayal of their constituents along two dimensions: the cynical destruction of their promise to repeal and replace, and their decision to continue inflicting Obamacare with its steadily increasing premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on their constituents.
This time it’s the Marion, IL, Veterans Administration clinic.
In 1971 Kirby Williams went to Vietnam as a US Army draftee and worked as a finance clerk. In 2010 he went to a Veterans Affairs clinic in southern Illinois where a radiologist took a scan of his kidneys.
Unfortunately, the radiologist missed a 2- to 3-centimeter mass in one of his kidneys, and by last December that mass had grown to between 7 and 8 centimeters. Now the 66-year-old has, at most, two to five years to live.
Williams isn’t the only victim.
Some scientists have successfully spliced some genes into a human embryo to correct a mutation that causes heart disease, proving the possibilities open to us and our health (and potentially eliminating health coverage provision as a Progressive-Democrat tool of welfare entrapment [/snark]).
Experts noted that the newly successful process could cure more than 10,000 genetic diseases, including some types of cancer and early-onset Alzheimer’s, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis.
“We have to be very delicate with how we use this because it’s very, very powerful,” Alice Benjamin, a clinical nurse specialist said on Fox & Friends.
These data are from the Kaiser Family Foundation. There was such hope by the health care coverage providers at the start; then the realities of the “market” place hit, and hit hard. Following the early expansion of coverage providers into ObamaMart, the drop-off in companies between 2016 and 2017, and the resulting collapse of choice—in too many counties, even of any availability at all—is stark. It’s expected to get worse in 2018 and 2019, too.
The State-by-State drop off is presented in the table below, constructed from KFF‘s table at the link. The average drop-off across all States is nearly 23%.